Carolyn Kaster/AP

Jimmy Carter turned 100 on October 1, making him the oldest former president. According to his family, Carter, also a former Georgia governor who has been in hospice care since February 2023, wanted to live long enough to cast his vote for Kamala Harris. He reached that milestone on Tuesday as early voting began in Georgia.

But three weeks before Election Day, does this raise a question? If Carter casts an absentee ballot and doesn’t make it before November 5th, will the state count his vote?

Georgia law does not address this issue.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, most states have not determined what to do in such cases. Ten laws expressly require that postal votes be counted regardless of the voter’s physical status. (Connecticut only allows this if the deceased voter was an active military member.) An additional ten states specifically prohibit counting such ballots. Two — Kentucky and Mississippi — have no law addressing the issue but are rejecting the ballots based on legal opinions from their attorneys general. Three others allow residents to challenge such ballots. Here is a map based on the NCSL balance sheet:

If I were your king or an authoritarian leader – something we may soon have – I would allow such votes because they reflect the hopes and fears of Americans living at the time about their own near future and the future of their families.

The reason we don’t let people vote after they die is obvious: they’re dead, which means those votes would be fraudulent. (Also, how far back would you go? Would you let the late Shirley Chisholm vote? How about Barry Goldwater?)

My preference on the postal vote question suggests that I would be a benevolent authoritarian. But I fear that what we might end up with would only allow for the voices of the recently dead republicans to count.

Heck, he might even make Goldwater eligible again. (MGEA?)

Good luck, Mr. Carter.